News / University of Bristol
Hopes new electric trailer ‘will take cars off the road’
A group of university students have designed a new electric trailer which they hope will take cars off the road, make shopping trips more sustainable and benefit car-less shoppers.
SLANT is the brainchild of a group of Innovation master’s students at the University of Bristol, who have been awarded £10,000 at a showcase to build two prototypes.
To use the trailer, shoppers would unlock it with a debit or credit card, to bring their shopping home and then leave it outside for a SLANT employee to return to the supermarket.
SLANT say the trailer, which attaches to a bike or e-scooter, would cost an average of £4 a trip and be “weightless”, making it easy to pull or push on foot.
Tarun George Maddila, Artemis Fragkopoulos, Nigel Deshpande, Louis Cocking and Sam Bell have designed a new e-trailer to tackle car journeys – photo: Bristol University
Some 73 per cent of shoppers use cars to get to and from the supermarket, totalling 4.5b journeys each year, which the SLANT team hope their trailer will address.
Tarun George Maddila, an Innovation master’s student who is part of the SLANT team and originally from India, said: “We hope this sustainable solution will help the environment and consumers – and supermarkets too, by increasing footfall, decreasing congestion and helping their net-zero commitments.
“I’m really excited by innovation – and when I wanted to study it I couldn’t think of a better place than Bristol. Without this course, and mixing with students and lecturers with all sorts of expertise, we never would have come up with this idea.
“We couldn’t be happier to win this funding, which will help us build the next stage of SLANT.”
In the next few months, SLANT will look to partner with a supermarket to trial the trailer. They plan to raise startup funding later in the year before pursuing a patent.
Main photo: University of Bristol
Read next:
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- Bristol employers launch new group to tackle cost-of-living crisis
- Dyson to open £100m technology centre in Bristol
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